But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? 
A reason for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pin-money, an old King’s Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth:  “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.”  Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices.  But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne.  But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail?  An allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—­ the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue.  I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality.  And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.

CHAPTER 91

The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud

“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.”  SIR T. BROWNE, V. E.

It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft.  A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.

“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day.  I thought they would keel up before long.”

Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside.  As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.  It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.  So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.  Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.